Whenever I meet people in conferences or meetups, I experiment with how I introduce myself. Every time I talk about myself and what I do, I make subtle changes and notice what reaction the other person gave.

This isn’t something I did in the initial stages of my career. When I started (as a programmer) I just told I am a software engineer or programmer in a startup. And I noticed that people will just start saying “Oh, OK. Cool. What does the startup do?” Then the conversation ends up being about the startup and I just missed the opportunity to make an impact on a stranger.

After my failed startup, I started consulting for other companies. And this was a stage when I used to attend a lot of meetups every weekend. And this is also the time when I began experimenting with my introductions.

Freelancer

Initially, I was saying “Hi I am Srini, I am a freelancer” or some variation of that. That was the most horrible thing I could say about myself. People kept saying “Uh? Ok. So you write code and stuff uh? What kind of code?”

Programmers doing Freelancing has this weird association with a code monkey who doesn’t know how to think. I kept hearing people who have this small task that they want help with and they were confused when I started asking deep probing questions about their product.

I didn’t communicate well enough that I am more of a product guy and I can help them end-to-end in researching, prototyping, building, and launching their product. Not just write a particular module and get paid.

Software Consultant

I started saying that I am a Consultant and this was slightly better. People began asking me help with different parts of their software and how I could help them. I was no longer a freelancer. However, there were still a few people who didn’t know what consulting was and their first question was “so consultant, like a freelancer?”

I had to resist the urge to not facepalm and reply back with how I was a bit different than just a coder they could hire on Elance.

I used to say that I work with startups and program stuff. But so does every other fresh programmer out of college. How was I different?

Solutions Architect

This was the stage when I promoted myself to be a Solutions/Software Architect (hey I was my own boss). This sounded cool and people started noticing me. Mostly because I spoke with confidence and authority, but partly because I called myself as an Architect.

Even this was missing something. I realised that nobody cared about the title. Yes, it did sound cool, but only before the kids. They see someone older claiming to be an architect, they will listen to every word you say.

My target audience were people higher up in startups. Guys who take the decision whether to hire me or not. For them, it doesn’t matter what I called myself. All they care about is how I am going to solve their problem.

Solve a problem

My introductions became something like this “I am Srini, I am a software/solutions consultant/architect and I help startups build products”. This clearly explains what I do and how I can immediately solve a problem for startups (my target audience). The responses were totally different.

Whenever I used this introduction, people used to start asking “Hmm, interesting. What kind of products do you build?” and “What startups have you worked with before?”.

I stopped being that code monkey or some weirdo who calls himself funkier titles. I began to be that person who can provide a solution to their tech product. And the conversation started and eventually, I would become their trusted advisor when it comes to building their product.

Even now, after becoming a full-time employee, I always test out my introductions. I explain what I do and what I have done in the company and so on. And since I am representing the company in such conferences and meetups, I test a lot of variants introducing the company too. In tomorrow’s post, I will explain how to explain what your company does.

I want to know how you introduce yourself. Please leave them in the comments below.

I am a regular podcast listener even before the recent upsurge of numerous podcast shows that has cropped up in recent times. This year I have listened to a record number of podcast episodes. I have learned a lot from them and I have also improved the way I listen and take notes. In this post, I will explain why and where I listen to podcasts, how I listen at nearly 2x speeds and the quickest way to take notes.

Why listen to podcasts?

The reason I listen to podcasts is very simple. Podcasts allow me to sit through a conversation between two important people who you could never meet in real life. I can be a “fly on the wall” listening to their conversation, learning from the best minds in the word.

Just imagine being able to sit with some of the brilliant marketers, entrepreneurs, copywriters, and other heroes and listen to their story. You get an hour of quality time with them and you don’t even have to ask them any questions. The host is doing all the hard work of researching about them and making the conversation interesting.

Where do I listen?

There are only a few places where I listen to podcasts. Occasionally I drive to work and I listen to few episodes during my drive. But since my commute is only about 20 minutes, I can squeeze in one episode maximum (I will tell one trick to listen to a 30-minute episode in 20 minutes).

Sometimes when I drop my wife at her office (which takes at least an hour) I can get some real quality time listening to more than 1 episode or one longer episode. However, I can listen to podcasts only when I am lonely in the car. My wife doesn’t like to listen to podcasts and would plug in her iPhone and play music.

When I Uber to work, I don’t listen to podcasts as the driver sometimes talk to me or ask directions and I don’t want to be rude.

Other times, I walk a bit and come back home on a train or sometimes even walk all the way home. This takes at least 1.5 hours and this gives me some serious podcast listening time. Of course one has to be mindful of the surroundings with earphones plugged in when walking on the roads.

A decent pair of wireless earphones makes it easy to listen to podcasts when walking. Since it’s all speech, I don’t care about the audio quality too much.

I have tried to listen to podcasts when I get onto the bed, but unfortunately, after 5 minutes I doze off and the podcast keeps playing for hours before I pause it. So I avoid listening in the bed.

How do I listen?

I use the Overcast podcast app for iPhone. I would say this is the best podcast app for iPhone. To my knowledge, this is the only app which has the “Smart Speed” feature, which shortens unwanted silences and other fillers in conversations. You can get 1.15x speed increase just by turning on “Smart Speed” with no noticeable difference in speech.

I go even one step further, where I increase the playback speed. I have heard of people go crazy speeds like 2x or 3x. But I have found that 1.75x is the maximum that I can sustain, especially when I am driving.

It isn’t too hard to train your ear and brain to start listening to 2x speeds. As you keep listening to speech and conversations at higher speeds, your brain automatically processes it without any loss of information. There are visually impaired people who have screen readers speaking at 5x speeds. Those are crazier compared to the 1.75x I listen to.

Along with the Smart Speed feature, I can hit 1.9-2x speed and that is a good enough pace to listen to podcasts. Once you start listening to such high speeds, if you try to go back to the old normal speed, it would feel as if everyone is deliberately slowing things down and it begins to feel funny.

How to get the most out of podcasts?

Podcasts are useless if you just keep listening to them and going on to the next episode. You are spending a significant time listening to it and it would all go to waste if you didn’t have a method to take notes of the episodes. I tried a variety of tools to take notes, here are them all.

Ask Siri to “make a note”

When listening, you can just say “Hey Siri, make a note. <insert your nugget of information>. I usually turn off the “Hey Siri” feature and prefer pressing the physical button to activate Siri. When driving, I can long press the phone button on my steering wheel to activate Siri.

But the problem with this is many times Siri doesn’t transcribe my message properly and I missed a lot of messages. Also, Siri would assume that the message is completed even though I am still talking.

Ask Siri to “record a voice memo”

Another option is to ask Siri to “record a voice memo” which opens up the voice recorder. Now you can talk speak your message and it gets recorded in your own voice. This is much better than making a note.

But voice recorder is all hidden away and I prefer to use a much simpler tool for recording short notes.

Send a Whatsapp message to yourself

Initially, I was sending voice messages and short notes to my wife and she was getting confused why I sent unrelated messages. Then I started sending Whatsapp messages to myself. Yes, you can send messages to yourself (sort of).

To do that, you have to first create a group with one other person. Name this group and then remove the other person from the group. Now you have a group with just yourself. Name it as “me” or “Myself”. Now you can send short messages and notes to yourself.

I prefer this nowadays as I have a history of all the messages and voice memos. Now I have a long history of conversations containing little nuggets of information, which I can later research on and move to my permanent Evernote notebook.

Listen to important episodes again

If you have some important episode which has so much information, it would make sense to listen to it again, and again. The goal here is to not memorize the content but to listen to it again in a different setting which will allow you to pick some new useful information every time.

I have noticed this when watching some comedy movies, on watching it once more, you unearth some small piece of comedy or dialogue which you missed earlier. I have experienced this during podcast episodes too. For important episodes, I just note down the episode number and I listen to it again.

These are my tips to listening to podcasts. What are some of your tips and tricks? And how do you take notes of your favourite episodes? Leave them in the comments below.

In any business organization, there are two types of sub-units or teams.

Profit Centers

Cost Centers

Profit Center

Profit Center is the team/department which gets the company money and thereby profits. They bring in the dough/bacon. One of the common example of a profit center is the sales department. Unless you have sales, you wouldn’t have customers and thereby no money.

Cost Center

Everything other than a profit center is a Cost center. Any team or department of a company to which various types of direct and indirect costs are charged are cost centers. It could be the Production or service departments in a factory, operations team, IT department, etc.

I am Srinivasan Rangarajan, (AKA) cnu. I love talking about Technology, Startups, Product Design, Marketing and related stuff. I have helped many startups build and scale their SaaS products to millions of users. Currently I head the Engineering Team at Mad Street Den.